Many computer environments employ windows having graphical user interface (GUI) capabilities that aid the user in interacting with various applications in a straight-forward and intuitive manner. Most of these applications use an object-action paradigm in which the user seeks the object they want to act on. Once the object is located and selected, the user selects the action that they want to take on the object. Because of the importance of ergonomic data in task orientation, applications have started to take a task oriented approach in which the application guides the user through the actions that they need to take via a wizard or a properties box of the GUI.
Generally, applications take a single approach to presenting their functionality to the user and the user has no means of taking a different approach based on user preferences, the constraints of the objective the user is trying to accomplish or the way the user is thinking of the current problem or objective. Users must therefore make their choice in the approach to functionality presentation when they buy applications that take different functionality approaches to a greater or lesser extent.
A disadvantage of the single approach to functionality presentation is that the approach may not match the user's needs in all situations. In addition, when accessing a suite of applications, this will cause the user to context switch according to the approach of the particular application. Users are forced to learn to access the functionality in the way that the application developed it. This places an extra burden on the user and can interfere with the user's productivity and can result in user errors. Assume, for example, that a user's objective is to find out whether a backup from the previous evening of a computer system named "PC1" was successful or if there were errors in the backup. The user could be thinking of this objective from a variety of different approaches: object-oriented, task-oriented, tool-oriented, or information-oriented. In the object-oriented approach, the user would wish to locate the computer PC1 and after locating it, would request information concerning the most recent backup of PC1. In the task-oriented approach, the user would want to look for the task of reviewing backup session information. In the tool-oriented approach, the user would wish to locate the tool that performed the backup, e.g., HP OpenView OmniBack, and then have that tool inform the user of the success of the backup session. In an information-oriented approach, the user would want to access a report on the success of the recent backup sessions. If the user was able to go to a single location and choose the approach to functionality presentation that matched the user's preferred approach to a task, they would not need to spend time reformulating their objectives in a way the matches the approach taken by the application.
There is therefore an unmet need in the art for a user to be able to access functionality based on the user's preferred approach to doing their work. Allowing the user to be able to choose how to access the desired functionality for a given task from a single location would greatly reduce the amount of errors made by the user and would also enhance the user's productivity.